The Importance of Product Mix in Capacity Planning
When engaging in capacity planning, it is important to consider the product mix and seasonality of your business to ensure an effective and accurate outcome.
When engaging in capacity planning, it is important to consider the product mix and seasonality of your business to ensure an effective and accurate outcome.
Industry analysts, big-time consultants, and your peers are all talking about technology, digital transformation, and the future of the supply chain. It can seem like a lot of noise given the day-to-day pressure you feel while working to ensure that inventory is on hand and positioned where it is supposed to be. With all you have on your plate, are you aware of the signs that it is time for a change?
If one is going to forecast demand into the future, it would make sense to get as true a picture as possible. For that, starting with historical demand would be the obvious choice. Choosing this data as the basis for forecasting would ensure the best possible projection out in the future.
Arkieva prides itself on providing some of the best in supply chain thought leadership. Over 300,000 individuals read our blog articles in 2021. The volatile nature of the supply chain today drove our readers to educate themselves on practical actions they can take to remain competitive.
We are excited to announce that we are rebranding Arkieva to fuel growth, strengthen our position in the market, and continue to be a recognized leader in the supply chain industry. Over the past few years, we have been relentlessly focused on solving the most complex planning challenges through simple, intuitive, end-to-end solutions leveraging our best-in-class data scientists, software developers, and supply chain optimization consultants.
Our focus in this blog series has been to establish forecast accuracy targets. In very general terms, the goal should be to add value to the business through the forecasting process. We have however focused on the forecast value add and using that to create a minimum acceptable forecast accuracy target in the previous blog. Now we will take that a step further and talk of ways of improving it.
We have all seen it in the news. Covid-19 outbreaks, labor shortages at the port as well as in trucking, and port delays coupled with high demand from consumers are causing major supply chain issues. Shipping containers are in short supply, or perhaps a better way to say it is that they are waiting to be unloaded or loaded resulting in a shortage. In this blog, let us try to enlist some possible future impacts of this situation. Let us look at it from the perspectives of the different players in the supply chain.
It is important to measure and improve the forecast accuracy at the right level of aggregation. If you measure at too high a level, your accuracy picture will look better than what it needs to be as the data at high (aggregated) levels is more forecastable. By contrast, at too low a level...
A company’s total inventory consists of many types of stock such as strategic, anticipation, safety, cycle, and unplanned. Cycle stock is most connected to the demand forecast; it is expected to be sold as the forecast becomes real demand. Safety stock on the other hand is extra stock to deal with the variability of the demand or supply. As such, it is not always linked to forecasting accuracy.
Learn the best approach to setting forecast accuracy targets and how to set expectations for your management team.